Page - 317 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

317 effects through nature-based mitigation (e.g. through carbon sequestration and car- bon storage in vegetation or soils; see e.g. IPCC 2014) and adaptation measures (Lo 2016) (see Fig.  14.1). The latter  – for example, reducing the urban heat island effect and disaster risk  – have strong implications for human health and well-being. This was taken up and elaborated on by major international policy processes such as the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands in its resolutions (e.g. see Resolution XII.13: Wetlands and disaster risk reduction (Ramsar 2015)) and related activities reflected in the themes of the World Wetlands Days 2017 “Wetlands for Disaster Risk Reduction”, and 2018 “Wetlands for a sustainable urban future”. Ecosystem-based approaches to adapting to climate change and reducing disaster risk have also been an important topic in the processes of the CBD (Lo 2016). 14.3 Biodiversity and  Health The emergence of the ecosystem service concept led to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005) with its synthesis report on health (Corvalan et  al. 2005) followed by the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity reports (TEEB 2010) and several national assessments (Schröter et  al. 2016). These assessments mainly focused on economic benefits of nature and mention health benefits only little or less explicitly. In the policy arena, the international treatment of the linkages of health and bio- diversity began with the COHAB Initiative that was established in response to out- puts of the First International “Conference on Health and Biodiversity  – COHAB 2005”, which took place in Galway, Ireland in August 2005 (see Box 14.1). The recommendations from that meeting addressed a number of key issues at the inter- face of biodiversity and human well-being, and raised issues of governance, equity Biodiversity Climate Change Human HealthThreat Fig. 14.1 Relationship between biodiversity, climate change and health. White arrows indicate a positive impact; dark arrows indicate a negative impact. The thickness of the lines corresponds to the strength of the impact 14 Global Developments: Policy Support for  Linking Biodiversity, Health and  Climate…